But as founder and owner of the renowned Arhoolie Records label (named for a call-and-response field holler once sung by African American slaves), Strachwitz has almost single-handedly brought recognition to such notable musical artists as bluesmen Lightning Hopkins and Mississippi Fred McDowell, Tex-Mex accordion master Flaco Jimenez, zydeco king Clifton Chenier and Cajun fiddler Michael Doucet, and inspired artists from Bob Dylan to Bonnie Raitt, Tom Waits, Ry Cooder and Taj Mahal.

Strachwitz has been doing this for more than 50 years, ever since he recorded the Texas country bluesman Mance Lipscomb in his living room and released his first album on the Arhoolie label in 1960, "Mance Lipscomb: Texas Sharecropper and Songster."

Now Arhoolie — and Strachwitz — are celebrating the half-century mark with a prodigious 192-page, full color hardcover book titled "They All Played for Us," with four CDs of 70 songs and almost five hours of music.

The CDs were recorded at a live concert over three nights in February 2011 at the renowned Freight and Salvage Coffeehouse in Berkeley and feature a who's who of folk, bluegrass, conjunto, zydeco and folk blues, most of them Arhoolie artists, but a handful who don't record for the label but are fans of the label and especially of Strachwitz.

Artists who performed that weekend include well-known artists such as Cooder, Mahal, Doucet and Country Joe McDonald, but also bluegrass stalwarts Laurie Lewis, Tom Rozum and Peter Rowan, Cajun artists Savoy Family Cajun Band, "sacred steel" band The Campbell Brothers, conjunto group Los Cenzontles, Any Old Time String Band and conjunto accordionist Santiago Jimenez Jr., brother of Flaco.

Artists such as Cooder and Mahal don't even record with Arhoolie, but were inspired to pay tribute to Strachwitz by playing in the concerts.

"Taj and Ry are real supporters of the foundation (the nonprofit Arhoolie Foundation is dedicated to documenting and preserving traditional and regional vernacular music) and realized how they were turned on to Arhoolie back in the early days," said Strachwitz in a phone call from the label's home in Berkeley. "The concerts were all a benefit for the foundation, which made some $50,000. It was amazing how all the artists came and played for nothing. I am really so grateful to all of them."

The book, which features more than 150 photos by photographer Mike Melnyk, is divided into chapters, each devoted to a single performance, with notes by Strachwitz and the performers themselves.

Grammy-winning artist Cooder recounts in the book how, as a young teen just learning to play the guitar, he found an album on Arhoolie by Big Joe Williams in a small record store in L.A.

"So I put this on and the music jumped out of the speaker at me: Big Joe Williams playing 'Sloppy Drunk.' Later I learned from Chris that he made the record right there in his kitchen in Los Gatos," said Cooder. "But back then, I didn't know who Big Joe was, I didn't know what the Arhoolie label was, or who Chris was. But this was so exciting to me — the sound of this guitar and this guy just tearing ... through this song and the next one and the next one."

Cooder said he not only learned how to play guitar from that record, but picked up more such records on Arhoolie and paid more attention to the extensive liner notes on each of the albums, which were written by Strachwitz.

"Somebody named Chris Strachwitz was making these records down South or finding these people in the south and recording them, living people. So that's a name I paid attention to," said Cooder, adding in a New York Times interview: "It started me on a path of living, the path I am still on."

For Strachwitz, a young German-born schoolteacher living in Los Gatos enamored with American traditional blues and folk, it was a relatively simple leap to go from the classroom to the fields, bars and one-room country shacks of the American South searching for the source of the music.

"I had heard other American music, like New Orleans jazz. I heard hillbilly music on (Mexican radio station) XERB and I heard rhythm and blues programs in the afternoon with Hunter Hancock," recalled Strachwitz. "He played that stuff and it absolutely caught my ears. Artists like Lightning Hopkins and Sonny Boy Williamson played this music, with that rhythm behind it. Nobody had even heard it before. It was so different from 'How Much is That Doggie in the Window' and all that other stuff in those days. You couldn't be anything but grabbed by it."

But that doesn't quite explain how he went from avid — some would say obsessed — fan to owner of his own record company.

"It came out of necessity. If I'm going to put in all that energy, I wanted control of it. I loved the record business," said Strachwitz, who had no formal training, either as a recording technician or record comapny owner. "Records were wonderful inventions. They last forever, they're wonderful objects and they have all that info on the back. You just can't beat it."

But surely all the technological advances over the past 50 years have been a boon to his business.

"We should throw them all in the ocean," he laughed, only half-joking. "Why invent some new crap? Recordings today are no better than what they did in 1928. In those days engineers had an ear and they had to mix it right on the spot ... and they did it perfectly. Today they overdub, underdub, sideways dub and whatever. Then you erase half of it and start over. It's just insane."

Strachwitz and Arhoolie haven't released much in the way of new recordings, save for "They All Played for Us" and a similar CD/book boxed set "Hear Me Howling: Blues, Ballads and Beyond" in 2010.

"The heyday of the record business is gone. Maybe it will sell in a bookstore," Strachwitz said wryly about "They All Played for Us." "I don't do much in the way of looking for more talent. It's just no fun when you can't sell it, you know? I just keep an eye on Arhoolie and the store (Down Home Music in El Cerrito)."

Strachwitz seems to be putting a lot of his energies into his latest project for the Arhoolie Foundation: archiving, cataloging and digitizing the massive and historic Strachwitz Frontera Collection of Mexican and Mexican-American Recordings, which numbers more than 50,000 songs.

Strachwitz is pragmatic, stoic even, when asked how he has managed to survive for more than 50 years in the often cutthroat record business.

"One, I'm lucky to have lived this long and two, we aren't really doing much better than the rest of them," he said. "Arhoolie and the record shop are on the verge of losing money. Don't know where I go from here. Guess I'll have to go back and pack records myself, but I have too much to do with the foundation. We'll have to see what happens with this book."

In fact, Strachwitz said he's about to begin work on another book, this one about American folklorist and musicologist Dr. Harry Oster. A documentary film about Arhoolie titled "No Mouse Music!" by filmmakers Maureen Gosling and Chris Simon is set to be released this year.

When asked what his proudest achievement has been, Strachwitz was quick to answer, rattling a number of discoveries and introductions, including convincing Chenier to record the more bluesy Creole music rather than the folkier Cajun music; bringing "sacred steel" gospel music to the public's attention; bringing Cooder and Flaco Jimenez together; bringing more attention to Texas-Mexican (Tex-Mex) music; and compiling the Frontera Collection and more.